Then he sprang to his feet and paced restlessly in the grass beside the
fire. We must leave this place, ride away from it-go quickly. I must
find something to do, some way to keep from thinking of it, something
to fill my hands which ache now from the need to hold her.
Along the road, going north to Colenso, a long column of infantry filed
past him in the dawn. He stopped his pacing and watched them.
Each man leaned forward against his pack and the rifles stood up behind
their shoulders.
Yes, he thought, I will go with them. Perhaps at the place to which
they march I can find what I could not find last night. We will go
home to Ladyburg, riding hard on fresh horses. I will leave Dirk with
my mother, then come back to this war.
He began to pace again impatiently. Where the hell was Mbejane?
From the heights above, Sean looked down on Ladyburg. The village
spread in a neat circle around the spire of the church. He remembered
the spite as beacon-bright in its cladding of new copper, but nineteen
years of weather had dulled it to a mellow brown.
Nineteen years. It did not seem that long. There were goods yards
around the station now, a new concrete bridge over the Baboon Stroom,
the blue gums in the plantation beyond the school were taller, and the
flamboyants that had lined the main street were gone.
With a strange reluctance Sean turned his head and looked out to the
right, across the Baboon Stroom, close in against the escarpment, to
where he had left the sprawling Dutch gabled homestead of Theumskraal
with its roof of combed yellow thatch and the shutters of yellow-wood
across the windows.
It was there, but not as he remembered it. Even at this distance he
could see the walls were flaking and mottled with patches of dampness;
the thatch was shaggy as the coat of an aftedale; one of the shutters
tilted slightly from a broken hinge; the lawns were brown and ragged
where the bare earth showed through. The dairy behind the house had
crumbled, its roof gone and the remains of its walls jutted forlornly
upwards to the height of a man's shoulder.
'Damn the little bastard!' Sean's anger flared abruptly as he saw the
neglect with which his twin brother had treated the lovely old house.
'He's so lazy he wouldn't get out of a bed he'd peed in. ' To Sean it
was not just a house. It was the place his father had built, which had
sheltered Sean on the day of his birth and through the years of his
childhood. When his father died under the Zulu spears at Isandlawana,
half the farm and the house had belonged to Sean; he had sat in the
study at nights with the logs burning in the stone fireplace and the
mounted buffalo head above it throwing distorted, moving shadows up on
to the plaster ceiling. Although he had given his share away-yet it
was still his home. Garry, his brother, had no right to let it decay
and fall apart this way.
'Damn him!' Sean voiced his thoughts out loud-then almost immediately
his conscience rebuked him. Garry was a cripple, his lower leg shot
away by the blast of a careless shotgun. And Sean had fired that
shotgun. Will I never be free of that guilt, how long must my penance
continue? He protested at the goad of his conscience.
